


Orphanage

by Rakefetzyz



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Orphanage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-12 06:08:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13541343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rakefetzyz/pseuds/Rakefetzyz
Summary: Matt's dad was killed and now he faces life alone in an orphanage.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Matt Murdock Stick and Foggy Nelson belong to Marvel and Netflix.

Chapter one  
Part one

Dedication: To the estimated 15.1 million children throughout the world who have lost both parents and to children living in orphanages everywhere: China, Russia, Ethiopia, Haiti, and so many other countries. 

 

No one cares for you a smidge  
When you’re in an orphanage -- from the musical , Annie

 

Dad! Daddy! Grief welled up inside him and Matt was alone.

During the first days after his accident, when the darkness seemed so vast and pulsating, and nothing mattered except that he couldn’t see, his dad was always there.

“Matty, I’m right here. It will be okay,” his dad had said. And somehow Matt knew that it would.

Now Matt lay awake in his assigned bed at the orphanage. His dad was dead, murdered, and there was no one to hold his hand and tell him that everything would be okay.

The sisters were kind in their brisk, efficient way, but he felt no real connection with them. 

There were two or three other boys around his age. They had been there longer and felt that gave them the right to boss the new kid around.

He bumped into a kid named Brandon because he was thinking about his dad and because the loud noises everywhere were making his head pound. He forgot to pay attention to his whereabouts.

“Why don't you look where you’re going, jerk!” Brandon grumbled, shoving Matt out of his way.

Sister Beatrice gave Brandon a severe talking-to. “How could you do that to a blind boy! You can see he needs a cane to find his way around!” But that didn’t make Brandon any friendlier.

Matt started staying in his room. Except when he was required to attend prayers or meals, he mostly lay on his bed. When the sisters asked why, he complained of the noise and the pain. It was true, the noises hurt. They just weren’t the only thing that hurt.

The place was called an orphanage but there were few true orphans. A lot of the kids had parents who still had rights. They came to visit and took the kids out for an afternoon. The kids returned smelling of pizza or chocolate ice cream or bragging about a new toy.

Sometimes prospective adoptive parents came to visit a child. They would take the kids out too. First for a few hours, then for a day and later to stay over the weekend. It ended with the child going to be fostered until the adoption could be finalized. Kids who were adopted a year or two before, proudly came back with their new families to donate outgrown clothes and games.

No prospective parents ever came to see Matt. When the sisters believed he was out of ear shot, Matt learned why.

“I wish there was someone to take an interest in Matthew,” Sister Beatrice sighed.

“If he was a girl, or if he was younger, under five or six, it would be easier,” Sister Mary Grace agreed.

“Also he’s blind. He’s copes well, or he did before his pain got bad, but...”

Adoptive parents, it seemed, usually preferred girls, they preferred younger children, and very few wanted a child with a disability. The chances that Matt could be adopted were close to zero.

Matt tried to resign himself to the loneliness, to the fact that no one would ever come to visit him.

Then one day Stick arrived.

 

Matt: We don’t live in a world that's fair. We live in this one. – from the episode, Nelson v. Murdock, season one.

 

 

Part Two

 

  
Will I ever know the sweet hello  
That’s meant for only me? -- from the musical, Oliver

 

Stick came and took Matt out for the afternoon and bought him ice cream. No one had bought him ice cream since his Dad died. The old man called him Matty, the way his dad did, too.

He understood about blindness, he was blind himself, from birth.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “You had nine years to look at movies and see the blue sky, peek up girlies’ skirts.” Matt just smirked at the last comment, but for the first time he thought that maybe he was lucky not to have been born blind. He still liked to picture the sky. If he had been born blind like Stick he wouldn’t be able to.

“The truck didn’t kill you, you lived? It’s a miracle!” Stick’s tone was sarcastic and goading, yet Matt had to acknowledge the truth in it. He could have died. The best part was, Stick sounded glad that Matt had lived.

He understood all about Matt’s crazy senses. He taught Matt to control them and it felt good not to have the sounds from everywhere pounding in his head. Matt learned to focus and to filter. Even the ice cream was an exercise in tasting. But that didn’t stop Matt from enjoying the rare treat. He even saved the wrapper.

“You have gifts. Gifts that very few people have.” Stick informed him. He did? Stick must think that he, Matt, was special and important.

Too soon, the visit came to an end. Stick walked him back to the orphanage. With a casual promise to return, he was gone before Matt went inside.

Did he mean it? Matt worried. Would Stick really come again?

Stick did return the next day and kept coming back each day to teach him more. Matt let himself hope that he mattered to someone again, that someone cared about him specially.

His dad had never wanted Matt to fight. “Your dad’s not here. I am,” Stick pointed out. That was true. His dad was dead and Matt needed Stick‘s approval, he needed Stick to keep returning. He learned martial arts and self defense, trying hard to please his teacher.

He listened intently to Stick’s talk of war.

“What war?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re ready,” Stick would say. Matt practiced kicks and flips, hoping that Stick would decide he was ready.

All the affection, bottled up inside him, he bestowed on Stick. He wished he had a gift for his teacher but Matt possessed so little at the orphanage. So he fashioned a bracelet from the saved ice cream wrapper.

Yet when Matt gave Stick the bracelet, the old man went away.

“I expected too much from you,” was all he said in explanation.

Matt knew it was somehow his fault. But how? Why? Why did Stick reject the affection that Matt desperately needed to give and so longed to feel in return?

Stick left, but the old man's teachings stayed in his student’s mind. “Are you going to cry and rock yourself to sleep or are you going to reshuffle the cards life gave you?” Matt let himself cry the first night. Then, once more, he made the choice to reshuffle.

 

Stick: You wanted a father and I wanted a soldier.  
Matt: Then I guess we were both disappointed. – from the episode, Stick, season one.


	2. Chapter 2

Part 3  
And if you couldn’t be loved, the next best thing was to be let alone. – L.M. Montgomery, Jane of Lantern Hill

Matt chose to take charge of his life, to reshuffle as Stick put it, yet he felt a need of support from somewhere. The people he might have turned to were dead or gone. He turned to God for support instead. 

All the kids at the orphanage were expected to attend prayers and Mass. Most did so grudgingly, only going through the motions. Matt had been to church with his dad when he was little, but less often once his grandmother died shortly after his First Communion. 

Now he started to take church seriously. He started going to confession more often, too. The rituals and sacraments gave him a sense of order in an otherwise insecure world. 

The nuns were delighted, obviously, and the kids found it reason to jeer and call him Saint Matthew. 

But now that Brandon had been sent to a group home for troubled teenagers, the teasing was less cruel. 

“Who are you calling a saint?” Matt would grab at the closest kid and scuffle with him. Soon the kids stopped bothering to tease. 

Besides, he remembered his grandmother's warning that the Murdock boys all have the devil in them. He knew he was in no danger of sainthood. 

The next thing Matt did was renew his academic efforts. He had missed some school before Stick came. His head pounded so badly, he couldn’t sit and concentrate. After Stick left, he felt well enough to go back. 

When he could still see, Matt excelled in academics. It was important to his dad that he use his mind and study. After the accident he needed some time to learn Braille before he could return to a regular classroom. But his dad encouraged him and he soon caught up with his grade. He was starting to excel again when his dad was killed. 

Now studying was a way to honor his dad’s memory. 

His dad had been strict about homework. “I’m tired,” Matt would plead, “I’ll finish in the morning before school.” 

“Finish tonight,” Jack Murdock always held firm and Matt obeyed. 

He thought his dad would want him to keep the rule now. However tired Matt felt, he always finished all homework before bed. And if that meant studying after lights out, well, he didn’t need light to study anyway. 

The kids were used to him now and most were friendlier. But they liked to spend their free time watching TV in the rec room or fighting over whose turn it was to play games on the outdated computer someone donated to the orphanage. Neither was much fun if you couldn’t see the screen. 

“Don’t be such a nerd,“ the kids urged him. “You use a computer at school.” 

“The one at school has the latest adaptive technology,” Matt explained. “This is a piece of junk someone dumped here when they got a better one.” 

He spent his time studying instead, pouring over Braille textbooks and listening to talking books. No one was surprised when he graduated from high school with academic honors.

The third thing Matt did was to continue the training he began with Stick. This was trickier than academics because he needed to keep It secret. So he listened for times when the gym had no team practice after school. 

He didn't know why he felt the need to keep up his martial arts. Stick had rejected him and his dad wouldn’t approve. Yet somehow he felt that this was what he was meant to be doing. Something inside him, maybe it was the Murdock boys’ devil, made him feel a need to punch and kick. He practiced as often as he could and seemed to have a natural talent. When he got older he started working out at his dad’s old gym with the boxing ring. It was strange. His dad would never have wanted this and yet it almost felt as if his dad was there with him. 

He had an idea that someday he could stop some other kid’s parents from getting killed, that some other kid wouldn’t have to grow up alone and unwanted. Yet he hoped he would never kill anyone. Even a villain might have children who loved him. Matt didn’t want to be the cause of even those kids growing with no parents. 

The nuns considered Matt to be one of their biggest success stories. He remained a practicing Catholic and was going on to college. Not many orphanage kids did either. If you measured by those standards then yes, he was a success. But If you measured by how alone and unwanted he felt until the day he packed his bag to leave, you came to a different conclusion.

 

Matt: No one can give you your life back ... You gotta take it back – The Defenders, episode one.


	3. Post Orphanage

Part 4 

At least homesickness is one disease I’ve escaped! I never heard of anybody being orphanage-sick, did you ?– Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs  


College was a chance for Matt to live in a dorm like the other students. It should have made him feel normal. Except it wasn’t normal to be blind. And it wasn’t normal not to be homesick the first week, because you didn’t have a home to feel sick for. 

He couldn’t do much about the blindness. He knew his way around, could sense the positions and movements of objects. But he couldn’t see. At college, he needed to attend lectures where professors wrote on whiteboards and showed PowerPoint displays. Not to mention all the reading. There was no choice but to accept accommodations. He accepted accommodations, but never pity. Pity was met with Matt’s fierce independence and with his outshining everyone in his courses. 

Just being blind drew pity from the other students. He didn’t want to find out what they would say to a blind orphan. So he kept that part of his life to himself. When asked, he replied, ”I was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen,” and left it at that. 

He made a few friends, but no close ones. He went to parties, and when he found that women students were attracted to him, he tried dating some of them. But nothing ever lasted. 

No one had really cared about him or wanted him in their life since he was ten. That made it hard to trust other people and trust issues made his relationships turn sour.

It wasn’t until Matt graduated from college and started at Columbia Law School that he found a real friend. He walked into room 312 at the dorm and introduced himself. 

“Matt Murdock,” he held out his hand. 

“Foggy Nelson,” said his roommate, taking it. 

Foggy? It sounded like a weather forecast. 

But Foggy had recognized Matt’s name and started talking about his accident, so Matt had no chance to comment. 

It turned out his real name was Franklin and the meteorologists had it wrong. Foggy was the most open, genuine person that Matt had ever met. Matt was adept at telling when someone was lying by this time and Foggy never lied. Oh, he’d say “You have the last bagel. I don’t want it” when he was saving it for a midnight snack. He pretended no interest in a girl he liked, if it was clear the girl preferred Matt. But he never told real lies. At least he never really lied to Matt. 

Matt was more open with Foggy than with anyone else, too. He couldn’t hide his past because Foggy was also from Hell’s Kitchen and he knew what had happened to Matt’s dad. He was sympathetic to Matt’s losses but didn’t treated them like a big thing. 

In a matter of fact way, Foggy let him know when someone nodded or what the notice on a class whiteboard said. Matt appreciated Foggy’s thoughtfulness. It was never condescending and was often helpful. Matt could sense the nods; he couldn’t read the notices. Other people made a big production of helping him. Or else they just didn’t bother to tell him what he was missing. 

Foggy seemed to like Matt and never thought twice about sharing his hopes and plans for after law school. But he shared them in ways that made Matt laugh. 

“I’m for truth and justice and all that. I just want to be filthy rich while I’m fighting for them.” 

Matt countered by quoting his childhood hero, Thurgood Marshall, “We must dissent from the fear,” and shared a memory with Foggy of reading the quote to his dad. 

“You were reading Marshall at nine or ten? Dude, I was reading comic books back then or maybe Roald Dahl.” 

“I prefer nonfiction,” Matt answered, glad that he could make his friend laugh, too. 

They planned their legal career together and shared dreams of being heroes themselves, protecting the rights of people who were weak or impoverished. 

Matt hated keeping things from his friend. He knew he could have told Foggy anything. But the problem had nothing to do with Foggy. The problem was him. He was just so used to having no one in his life that he could trust. 

Matt shared everything with Foggy except the one thing that made him even stranger and set him apart far more than being blind or having no family. He couldn't quite muster enough trust to tell Foggy about his special abilities.

 

Foggy: I wouldn't have kept this from you, Matt. Not from you.  
Matt: You don’t know that.  
Foggy: Yeah, I do. –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Daddy-Long-Legs was published in 1912 and the orphanage in the book is called an asylum. The actual quote at the top of this chapter reads “I never heard of anybody being asylum-sick, did you?” I changed it slightly to make the meaning clearer.
> 
> I chose the quote at the end because I believe Foggy would have shared everything with Matt. He had a stable home life, and would not have the trust issues that Matt does.

**Author's Note:**

> The Netflix series says very little about Matt’s mother. I wasn’t sure if she is supposed to still have any kind of parental rights. Since she didn’t come forward to be there for her son after his father was killed, I decided that she doesn’t deserve any rights.


End file.
